I was forwarded an e-mail by an old friend (and one who shares my occasional enthusiasm for shopping) recently. It concerned the phenomenon of s-shopping.

S-shopping, according to the email, is the way of the future as far as development of the retail experience goes. To engage in sshopping, you simply walk into a building known as a shop (easily located in an urban area) look at the goods on display, make your choice (trying items on for size if necessary), pay for the merchandise and take it home.

This means an end to peering at grainy photos which take five minutes to download, receiving clothes that don't fit or are not what you ordered and then having to parcel them up, return them and wait for a replacement.

And, of course, if you spend your day in front of a computer, buying by retail means that you actually get out of the office!

A joke it might have been but it encapsulated all the problems of Net-shopping and the recent trials and tribulations of the whole e-commerce sector.

It's a sector which is under both the spotlight and the cosh again with Amazon.com coming under the scrutiny of analysts in the last week and, in the process, seeing its share price decimated.

Amazon, the pioneer of the "you-don't-have-to-make-a-profit-once-you've-got-amassive-turnover' brigade" is running out of money. It's not entirely surprising, given that investors generally have become more choosy about their new-economy choices - there has been less and less money available for start-up operations since the first quarter of this year and now there's less and less money available for up-and-running companies too.

The demise of Boo.com was enough to rattle a number of people, although subsequent reporting of the expense-account lifestyles of Boo's directors made you wonder how on earth it even kept going as long as it did. But it certainly brought into question the operation of many other e-tailing companies.

Another recent casualty was deisgnersdirect.com (despite my purchase a few months ago of the Calvin Klein's). An announcement on the company's website informs customers that it was unable to secure financing to continue operations and that it is currently selling the Web address to another company.

Apparently this other company will be providing us with the great products and service in the future that designersdirect did in the past but I have my doubts.

Designersdirect.com was a virtual grandfather in the e-tailing business given that it had been operating for over four years and shipped to more than 150 countries. It also won e-Business magazine's "Best-in-Business" award - which sounds like one of those votes of confidence in the manager of a losing football team.

Amazon, though, is the holy grail of e-tailers. For starters, its products are ideal for buying over the net and it has built up a solid reputation for delivering the goods at deeply discounted prices. But, as we've said time and time again, it's not making any money. It's still nowhere near making money.

Not so long ago, you might remember, its share price fell because its losses weren't high enough. Now, according to the analysts at Lehman Brothers, if it doesn't manage to obtain more financing soon it'll run out of cash. They're predicting this might happen sometime within the next year, which put the cat firmly among the pigeons of the new-economy sector.

Naturally, the share price and the price of Amazon's bonds fell after the report. Neither is good news for the company, which has raised cash by issuing junk bonds since its formation. The junk rating on the bonds doesn't necessarily mean that the company is junk (though that's obviously a matter of opinion), but that there is a higher possibility of the company being unable to pay interest payments at some point.

People buy junk bonds because the yield on them is significantly higher than on bonds with a recognised credit rating. And, in the past, when interest rates were around 4 per cent and yields on high-quality corporate paper not much higher, it seemed to make sense to throw some money at double-digit yielding paper - especially in a sexy new industry that was going to change the way we shop forever.

But market sentiment has changed and people who were ready to pour money into dot.coms last year are not going to do it again this year, especially since many of them have had their fingers singed if not burned over the last few months.

So this concentration of concern on Amazon will continue to ripple through the rest of the sector. Call me hopelessly pessimistic but, if people think that by buying into the dot.com industry now they're not going to see any returns for the foreseeable future, it's curtains for some of the e-tailers already struggling to survive.

It seems like the smart money will end up in the business-to-business sector (or B2B to get my terminology completely up to date) rather than the consumer sector which, let's face it, is costing companies billions as they try to haul consumers on to their lists.

Freeserve's 17 per cent share price fall at the beginning of the week is a sign that European Internet stocks are every bit as vulnerable as those in the US. Meanwhile, traditional retailers who are using the Net as an adjunct to their established business can reap the benefits. But many of them still don't have a coherent Internet strategy and adopt a hit and miss approach. They advertise their websites but don't actively exploit them - what's the point in a shop showing you the goods if you can't buy them online, even with the hassles that can bring?

So far, the best exponents of the art are the discount airlines where you can book online and print out your confirmation at home. This should be good for the airlines and good for the consumer too, although the onus is on you to get everything right. I have a moment of panic when I confirm the flight on the Net just in case I've managed to commit to the right time on the wrong day.

I'm left with horrible visions of managing to book a selection of flights through being a bit thick with the keyboard and having the credit card company ringing me up to relieve me of the plastic as a consequence.

And although personal customers are usually way down the list of great credits as far as the financial institutions are concerned, at least most of us end up paying them back. Which is more than can be said about our counterparts in cyberspace.